European Tour

New galleries demonstrate Philippe de Montebello’s method.

Camille Corot’s “Bacchante by the Sea” (1865). A new room promotes him as a one-man Brain Trust for the rethinking of landscape and figuration in the aftermath of Romanticism.

Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

“If this were four years ago, we would be standing in thin air,” Gary Tinterow said in one of the Metropolitan Museum’s ten new galleries—making a total of thirty-one, spanning nearly forty thousand square feet—for nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art, of which Tinterow is the curator in charge. Some of the space was a brainstorm of Philippe de Montebello, who is soon to retire as the Met’s director after a glorious thirty-one-year reign. (How badly he will be missed we must wait to know.) As Tinterow told it, “Philippe looked up in the Oceanic collection”—a colossal first-floor space, which reopened last year and is still plenty lofty—“and thought, I can create more galleries.” The extra galleries were needed for an abundance of new acquisitions, as well as for many treasures that have languished in storage, and were called forth by a chronic de Montebelloan itch, which is also apparent in the recently refashioned quarters for Greek and Roman art, French decorative arts, and Native North American art: make what’s good better. The result displays the director’s touch to a degree that is common among feats of his regime—which is not at all. It is the work of strong-minded curators, led by Tinterow and Rebecca Rabinow, an associate curator, who have been given liberty and firm support to manifest their tastes and ideas. These are both crowd-pleasingly theatrical, as in the prominent hanging of a splashy item like John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X,” and deep-dish scholarly, in, for example, three galleries packed with oil sketches, many by barely known hands, from the early nineteenth century. Labels perch casually on wainscoting shelves in rooms of laconic Beaux-Arts design until the late arrival of a more modern look, with the wainscoting dropping to baseboards. Walls are painted warm, perfect colors: oxblood for the Romantics, eggplantish for the Post-Impressionists. The installation runs on pleasures of absorption, aiming less to educate than to serve self-education. (“They expect everybody to become a connoisseur!” a friend marvelled as we toured the premises.) These are old-fashioned virtues, which, like most of the de Montebello Met’s more than thirty special exhibitions a year, scintillate.

Museology is in moral crisis after a spate of manic construction that has exalted edifices over their contents, and institutional narcissism over the romance of art lovers and art works. Witness the revamped Museum of Modern Art: it is less a building than a life-size architectural maquette, in which you and I fill the roles of little figures stuck in to convey scale. Our enjoyment of the museum’s unequalled collections feels incidental to another, mysterious purpose, perhaps known only by some executive cabal. I think that unease with the Modern helps to explain the euphoria, of everyone I know in the art world, that has come to attend any visit to the Met—a place that is not only for us but about us, as parishioners of visual high culture. Like ever fewer museum directors today, de Montebello cut his professional teeth as a curator, specializing in European paintings. The open secret of his success is a deep feel for the seriousness, and an identification with the enthusiasm, of his curatorial team. He trusts and abets their yearnings to connect. The payoff is a museum that honors the variety and the alacrity of our interests and appetites, and by “our” I mean that of all who vote with their feet to be present. (Met crowds, though inconveniencing, impart a sweetness of democratic participation like that of the first half hour or so of showing up for jury duty.) With gladness, I note a tincture of that quality in the compact, vernacular spaces and the curatorial tact of an inaugural show of assembled sculpture and collage at the relocated New Museum of Contemporary Art. The New Museum also palpably credits viewers with a will and a right to uncoerced experience. So it can be done, with or without marble pilasters. The tipoff is that you don’t find yourself wondering why anything is designed or presented in the way that it is. To look is to get it.

For those of us who have looked a great deal at the Met’s nineteenth-century exhibits, their reshuffling and enhancement, with some two hundred more works than before, are a tonic shock. The revision pushes a re-start button in our understanding of modernity’s genesis, bringing settled estimations of artists and movements up for review. I foresee consequential effects on young artists and scholars, who have been given what almost amounts to a new past. The novelties may not be radical; they involve no shakeup in historical categories, beyond a powerful representation of early Picasso, Matisse, Derain, and other flat-out moderns. (This highlights an abrupt transition, to put it mildly, in a time line that begins with students of David.) And not much could be done to correct the biases of the collectors and the patrons, mostly bygone, who have supplied the collection—chiefly, a compulsive skew to the French and a wariness of the spicy, apparent in a weak account of Symbolism and related tastes. (The curators counter that lacuna with their one reconstituted interior: the incredible Art Nouveau “Wisteria Dining Room,” of 1910-14, a Parisian fantasia whose panelling, murals, rug, and furniture run a contagious fever of neurotic aestheticism.) Genteel proclivities persist in overemphases of Pissarro, Degas ballet dancers, Renoir, Bonnard, and society portraiture. But even those soft spots register freshly, demanding retooled thought from anyone who would disparage them—in the company of masses of citizens whom they still and will always genuinely thrill. Meanwhile, paramount figures are pressured to reassert their authority. Ingres, Manet, Cézanne, and van Gogh do so. Degas’s scads of paintings, pastels, and sculptures, albeit marvellous, feel a mite diminished—dawdling in relative intensity. Up surprising notches from their wonted heights, for me, are Corot, Courbet, and, of all perennial beauty-contest winners, Monet.

The curators have given us a room of Corot paintings which promotes the Barbizon master as a one-man Brain Trust for the rethinking of landscape and figuration in the aftermath of Romanticism. Picasso, in his neoclassical phase, adapted Corot’s investment of figures with sculptural weight. No one, to this day, has matched his silvery landscapes that conjoin dreaminess and the scratchy specificities of raw nature. The lovely, small “Bacchante by the Sea” (1865) is like a Rosetta Stone of painting, in which a studio nude and a landscape differently translate a singular, poetic imperative. The rooms of oil sketches, which will reward hours of honed discrimination, provide a nicely lulling setup for the thunderclap début of Courbet, whose titanic ambition and downright rudeness announce a rough-and-tumble new world that feels contemporary again in ways that will engage us when a Courbet retrospective, now in Paris, opens at the Met on February 27th. Was he drunk when he painted “After the Hunt” (ca. 1859)? The crazy miens of a hunter and his dogs, gloating over dead game, suggest it, as does the work’s blowsy but enthralling lyricism, like that of a pub tenor after midnight. Observe, in the new hanging, how the later, similarly aggressive—though dashingly urbane—majesty of Manet seems to draft, like a race car, in Courbet’s slipstream. As for Monet, the concentrated array of his paintings, in context, revivifies his genius, on a level of purely visual intelligence—and of breathtaking indifference to anything else—where he stands alone in the universe. Beholding one of the “Rouen Cathedral”s the other day reawakened a feeling about Monet that I hadn’t had in many years: fright, at the apparition of a god of unfathomable pleasure.

And now for something awful: an instructive gallery, entitled “European Visions of North Africa,” of Orientalist paintings by academicians, most skillfully and egregiously Jean-Léon Gérôme. (But make an exception for the sneaking beauties of Charles Bargue’s “A Bashi-Bazouk.”) Brilliantly, this embarrassing legacy of imperialist condescension will serve as an anteroom to the authenticities of the Met’s Islamic collections, which are set to reopen in 2011. These and other Salon products newly on view—including three paintings by the underrated Franz Xaver Winterhalter, a society portraitist whose mannerly archaism feels arrestingly honest—serve an immersion in actual as opposed to tendentiously edited history.

Might the self-evident goodness of the Met’s curatorial style key a trend in museums? I suspect that our current, practically hysterical adulation of de Montebello evinces a fear that, like Prospero, he will drown the magic as he departs. But it may equally announce a Zeitgeist. Perhaps we’ve had enough, at last, of preening and second-guessing, agenda-ridden, sweaty-palmed institutional imbroglios. De Montebello’s obvious formula should not elude the grasp of lesser mortals: get top people who love what they do, then have them do it. Make everything else secondary. ♦